Announcing Amazon EC2 Mac instances for macOS
Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Mac instances for macOS are generally available. Built on Apple Mac mini computers, EC2 Mac instances enable customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the AWS cloud for the first time, extending the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers. With EC2 Mac instances, developers creating apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari can now provision and access macOS environments within minutes, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing.
Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Mac instances for macOS are generally available. Built on Apple Mac mini computers, EC2 Mac instances enable customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the AWS cloud for the first time, extending the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers. With EC2 Mac instances, developers creating apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari can now provision and access macOS environments within minutes, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing.
Today, millions of Apple developers rely on macOS and its innovative tools, frameworks, and APIs to develop, build, test, and sign apps for Apple’s industry-leading platforms that serve more than a billion customers globally. With EC2 Mac instances, developers are now able to leverage the flexibility, elasticity, and scale of AWS so they can increase their focus on core innovation such as developing creative and useful apps and spend less time on managing infrastructure. Customers can also consolidate development of Apple, Windows, and Android apps onto AWS, leading to increased developer productivity and accelerated time to market. Similar to other EC2 instances, customers can easily use EC2 Mac instances together with AWS services and features like Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for network security, Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for fast and expandable storage, Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) for distributing build queues, Amazon FSx for scalable file storage, and AWS Systems Manager (SSM) for configuring, managing, and patching macOS environments. The availability of EC2 Mac instances also offloads the heavy lifting that comes with managing infrastructure to AWS, which means Apple developers can focus entirely on building great apps.
EC2 Mac instances are powered by a combination of Mac mini computers—featuring Intel’s 8th generation 3.2 GHz (4.6 GHz turbo) Core i7 processors, 6 physical/12 logical cores, and 32 GiB of memory - and the AWS Nitro System, providing up to 10 Gbps of VPC network bandwidth and 8 Gbps of EBS storage bandwidth through high-speed Thunderbolt 3 connections. Amazon EC2 Mac instances are uniquely enabled by the AWS Nitro System, which makes it possible to offer Mac mini computers as a fully integrated and managed compute instances with Amazon VPC networking and Amazon EBS storage just like any other Amazon EC2 instance. EC2 Mac instances are available in bare metal instance size (mac1.metal), and support macOS Mojave 10.14 and macOS Catalina 10.15, with support for macOS Big Sur 11.0 coming soon. Customers can connect to Mac instances via both SSH for Command Line Interface and active remote screen sharing using a VNC client for a graphical interface.
EC2 Mac instances are available today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia-Pacific (Singapore) AWS Regions as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum host allocation duration of 24 hours. EC2 Mac instances are available for purchase On-Demand or as part of Savings Plan (1 year and 3 year). Learn more about AWS Mac instances here or start a machine today in the AWS Console.